An agreement between the Justice Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs allows the VA to put veterans under guardianship if they are unable to make their own health care decisions. A memorandum of understanding announced last week by the department gives VA attorneys the legal authority to enter into state court guardianships or conservatorship proceedings in cases where veterans don’t have family or legal representation to determine medical treatment. VA officials say the process will help hundreds of veterans hospitalized at VA facilities who are unable to transition to more appropriate settings. “Our new partnership with the Justice Department reflects our ongoing commitment to ensuring that every veteran receives timely, appropriate care, even in complex cases,” VA Secretary Doug Collins said in a release. VA officials said the agreement is aimed at helping roughly 700 veterans languishing in VA facilities, but the announcement, which noted that the agreement includes some veterans who are “either homeless or at risk of homelessness,” raised concerns among advocates that the authority could be applied to a larger population of veterans, such as those living on the streets. Carl Blake, CEO of Paralyzed Veterans of America, said court-ordered guardianships or conservatorships could result in a veteran’s loss of rights or lead to unnecessary institutionalization. Blake asked how the VA previously met the needs of incapacitated veterans and whether they would have access to their own legal representation — paid for by the VA — if necessary. “Guardianship can severely — or permanently — restrict an individual’s autonomy, civil liberties, and access to community-based supports,” Blake said in a statement on March 13. “Veterans who have served our country deserve care that honors their dignity, preserves their rights, and supports their ability to live in the community with appropriate services.” Under the program, VA attorneys can ask a state court to determine if a veteran needs a court-appointed guardian to “represent the veteran’s best interests” to determine appropriate medical care, VA Press Secretary Pete Kasperowicz said in an email to Military Times. According to Kasperowicz, the decisions would be made with “full due-process and process rights for the veterans involved and continuous court supervision of the guardian,” and the court — not the VA — would appoint the representative. Despite the VA’s assurances, California Rep. Mark Takano, the ranking Democrat on the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said the agreement puts VA in a position where it is responsible for a veteran’s well-being as well as the “legal driver of stripping veterans of their rights.” “Guardianship should always be a last resort, after all less restrictive options have been exhausted, to ensure veterans’ rights are protected. Veterans fought for our freedom and theirs. The federal government should not be engineering ways of taking it away,” Takano said in a statement on March 11. Kasperowicz said the agreement is not an effort to institutionalize veterans against their will. Instead, he said, it provides the VA an avenue for removing veterans already stuck in VA hospitals who could benefit from other settings. “We are trying to get them in the most appropriate care setting for their needs,” he said. Blake asked the VA and Justice Department to commit to transparency, allowing for public scrutiny and independent oversight to ensure that affected veterans do not lose their civil liberties. “VA must carefully consider any broad use of guardianship as a care-planning shortcut and adopt policies with robust safeguards,” Blake said.

The Supreme Court will kick off its March argument session by hearing a case that could have major implications for the 2026 elections and beyond. In Watson v. Republican National Committee, the justices will decide whether federal law requires not only that voters cast their ballots by Election Day, but also that election officials receive the ballots by then. If the justices agree that it does, laws in more than a dozen states could be upended. The Constitution provides that “[t]he Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” In 1845, Congress – which has the power to determine when the president is elected – chose the Tuesday after the first Monday in November as “election day,” and in 1872 it directed that congressional elections should occur on this day, as well. In 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mississippi changed its election laws to allow mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they were postmarked by, and then received within five business days of, Election Day. In 2024, the Republican National Committee and the Mississippi Republican Party, along with a Mississippi voter and a county election official, went to federal court to challenge the post-election ballot deadline; the Libertarian Party of Mississippi filed a similar lawsuit a few weeks later, which was combined with the first suit. The challengers contended that the Mississippi law conflicted with the federal law setting the Tuesday after the first Monday in November as the “election day.” Senior U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola, Jr., upheld the law. He wrote that “Congress set a national election day to avoid the ‘evils’ of burdening citizens with multiple election days and of risking undue influence upon voters in one state from the announced tallies in states voting earlier. Neither of those concerns,” he concluded, “is raised by allowing a reasonable interval for ballots cast and postmarked by election day to arrive by mail.”   The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed. A three-judge panel made up of Judges James Ho, Kyle Duncan, and Andrew Oldham ruled that federal law requires all ballots to be received by Election Day. Over a dissent by five judges, the full court of appeals turned down Mississippi’s plea to rehear the case, and the Supreme Court agreed in November to weigh in. In its brief on the merits, Mississippi argued that, for purposes of the federal law, an “election” occurs when voters cast their ballots and choose the candidate that they want to serve in office, and an election does not hinge on when election officials receive those ballots, just as it does not depend on when officials count the ballots. The Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, Mississippi wrote, “reinforces that ballot receipt is not part of an election.” In its ruling on the interim docket, Mississippi said, the court blocked a lower-court order that would have allowed ballots to be mailed after Wisconsin’s primary election day. In doing so, Mississippi emphasized, the court distinguished between “the date by which ballots may be … received” by election officials and the date by which they must be cast by voters, thereby acknowledging that the latter is “‘fundamental[]’ to voting and thus to the election itself,” while the former is not. Mississippi contended that its interpretation is also supported by the history of the federal law establishing a uniform Election Day. Congress enacted the statute, the state said, “to address problems from States holding elections on different days” – for example, the voter fraud that resulted when people were able to vote in more than one state, or the burden created when voters were required to come to the polls on two separate days to vote for president and members of Congress. “Congress was not addressing or deciding an issue of ballot receipt” when it passed the law, Mississippi insisted. If the 5th Circuit were correct that federal law requires ballots to be received by Election Day, Mississippi cautioned, it would “override countless state laws from the past 165 years and largely require citizens to vote in person, on election day, in their home districts, without the secret-ballot system.” “Congress,” Mississippi concluded, “did not impose the destabilizing revolution in election administration that the ruling below would require.” A “friend of the court” brief supporting Mississippi, filed by several “individuals and organizations representing military and overseas voters,” warned the justices that a ruling that upholds the 5th Circuit’s decision could disproportionately affect members of the military and their families. There are almost 4 million service members who are stationed overseas or outside their home state, the brief said. Those service members, along with their families and others who live overseas, “encounter time-consuming challenges to register to vote, obtain absentee ballots, and return those ballots,” the brief reported. A brief from the League of United Latin American Citizens echoed the military groups’ concerns. LULAC told the justices that many of its members “vote by mail because they live in rural communities, are elderly or disabled, wish to avoid in-person intimidation at the polling place, are students, or are members of the military.” “Without a post-Election Day receipt window,” LULAC contended, “many of those ballots will predictably miss the deadline.” This is especially likely to happen, LULAC stressed, in light of “[r]ecent changes to the United States Postal Service” that could result in ballots missing the receipt deadline. The challengers countered that, under federal law, an “election” occurs when ballots are both submitted and received and that, as a result, laws like Mississippi’s that allow ballots to be counted after the date set by Congress are invalid. They pointed to the Supreme Court’s 1997 decision in Foster v. Love, in which the justices ruled that Louisiana’s “open primary” system, which held elections for Congress in October that effectively ended such contests before November, conflicted with federal law. “When the federal statutes speak of ‘the election’ of a Senator or Representative,” Justice David Souter wrote for a unanimous court, “they plainly refer to the combined actions of voters and officials meant to make a final selection of an officeholder.” One challenger, the Libertarian Party of Mississippi, told the justices that the state’s “counterintuitive distinction” between when a voter completes and submits a ballot and when the ballot is received “would have struck the 19th-century public as bizarre” because, at that time, “virtually all ballots were marked, submitted, received, and deposited at polling stations in a matter of moments.” The Libertarian Party added that the entire purpose “of the federal Election-Day statutes is to set a single uniform day for the election. Allowing ballots to trickle in days or weeks” later, it said, “is antithetical to that basic goal.” Another set of challengers, the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Mississippi, argued that the court’s decision in Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee does not help the state. Because that case, the Republicans said, arose from Wisconsin’s presidential primary in 2020, the federal Election-Day statutes “were not even implicated.” But in any event, they continued, the issue in that case was whether voters could mail their ballots after Election Day, not whether the ballots could be counted if they were received after Election Day. The Trump administration, which filed a “friend of the court” brief supporting the challengers, pushed back against an argument made primarily by the veterans’ groups that had joined the lawsuit to defend the Mississippi law – specifically, that federal laws incorporating state-law deadlines for receiving the ballots of overseas service members confirm that Congress did not intend to require all ballots to be received by Election Day. Such “narrow exceptions,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote, “do not redefine the general rule” but instead simply “relaxed the federal deadline for a cabined class of voters.” A group of nine states, led by Montana, filed a “friend of the court” brief in which they too urged the justices to uphold the 5th Circuit’s decision. They assured the court that, contrary to the arguments made by groups like LULAC, “[r]equiring mail-in ballots to arrive by Election Day poses no real hardship for absentee voters. The Postal Service delivers the vast majority of absentee ballots extremely quickly.” Moreover, the states said, “there must be a final deadline, and some voters will ultimately miss” it. “But announcing the deadline on [a] specific day in November,” the states suggested, “will make it more likely that voters meet it.” The post Court to hear argument in case that could have significant impact on 2026 elections appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

Immigration Matters is a recurring series by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández that analyzes the court’s immigration docket, highlighting emerging legal questions about new policy and enforcement practices. Requests for asylum typically include complex descriptions of violence and fear followed by flight to the United States. In immigration courts, it falls on immigration judges to decide whether the facts on the ground are what the asylum applicant claims them to be. If they are, immigration judges must determine whether immigration law extends safe harbor to the applicant. Earlier this month, a unanimous Supreme Court decided, in Urias-Orellana v. Bondi, that federal appellate courts must defer to immigration judges and their colleagues who hear appeals. Although that decision may sound somewhat technical, it has major consequences: The court’s decision puts more responsibility on decision-makers who are stretched thin by mounting caseloads, while making it more difficult for migrants to ask federal appellate courts to overturn asylum denials. Asylum is a core humanitarian feature of federal immigration law. Stemming from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Right’s promise that “[e]veryone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution,” it was added to U.S. law in 1980. Since then, any migrant who is in the United States may request legal permission to remain in the country as a permanent resident, opening a pathway to citizenship. But for all its promise of safety in the United States, the law of asylum does not promise to protect everyone who faces violence, including death, abroad. To be granted asylum in the United States, a migrant must show that they have suffered past persecution or have a “well-founded fear of future persecution” because of one of five specific reasons: their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. After considering any evidence that an applicant presents, which often includes testimony about the violence that led to their decision to flee, immigration judges are tasked with deciding whether the applicant has met the legal requirements. If the asylum applicant or the federal government – represented in immigration court by an attorney for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Department of Homeland Security – disagrees with the immigration judge’s decision, they can ask a separate entity, the Board of Immigration Appeals, to review it. Neither the nation’s immigration courts nor the BIA are part of the judicial branch. Instead, both are units of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Whichever party loses at the BIA can appeal to a federal circuit court. This month’s decision in Urias-Orellana v. Bondi made clear that federal appellate courts have a limited role overseeing asylum claims. The court held that federal judges must ordinarily defer to the decision that the immigration judge and the BIA made about whether the facts constitute persecution. Their “determination whether a given set of undisputed facts rises to the level of persecution,” as required to receive asylum, “is generally ‘conclusive unless any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude to the contrary,’” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote on behalf of a unanimous court. Specifically, the justices’ opinion focuses on a small set of amendments that Congress made to immigration law in 1996. Douglas Humberto Urias-Orellana, who challenged an immigration judge’s denial of his asylum application, along with his wife and their minor son, “focus on the metaphorical trees” but “missed the forest” in which the provision constraining courts’ role was enacted, Jackson wrote. These changes, signed into law by President Bill Clinton as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, “tend to restrict (rather than expand) review of immigration-related determinations in federal court,” according to the court’s opinion. As the justices suggest, context matters. The court focused on the legislative context in which Congress revamped judicial oversight of immigration agencies. But it overlooked the practical context in which its decision will reverberate. Like all claims raised in immigration court, requests for asylum enter a legal process characterized by vast quantities of cases falling on an ever-smaller number of decision makers. Asylum applications are routine in immigration courts. In fiscal year 2025, for example, migrants filed almost 875,000 asylum cases with immigration courts nationwide. Added to the backlog of cases that already existed, the immigration court system ended the federal government’s fiscal year, on Sept. 30, 2025, with almost 2.5 million asylum cases pending. The Justice Department doesn’t publish similar data about the number of asylum appeals that reach the BIA. Still, the appellate bureau’s workload, which includes requests to review decisions by immigration judges about asylum requests, has increased substantially in the last few years. From the end of September 2024 to the close of December 2025, the number of appeals pending at the BIA increased by 58%. At the beginning of this year, there were almost a quarter million cases waiting to be decided by BIA members. In addition to a growing workload and a smaller cadre of decision makers, immigration judges and BIA members, as Justice Department employees, are subject to policy directives that shift based on the political goals of the presidential administration. In June 2021, for example, the Executive Office of Immigration Review’s acting director, Jean King, informed immigration judges and BIA members that they were expected to consider whether a case fit the Biden administration’s immigration law enforcement priorities. Since asylum cases typically didn’t, immigration judges throughout Biden’s term decided fewer asylum claims based on their facts than they dismissed because of policy choices. And the EOIR’s acting director under Trump, Sirce Owen, instructed immigration judges and BIA members, in April 2025, to dismiss asylum requests without so much as a hearing. Meanwhile, the number of EOIR decision makers has dropped. In the 2025 fiscal year, there were only 634 immigration judges spread throughout the country’s network of immigration courts, a drop of 101 from 735 immigration judges the year before. There are even fewer now: The agency’s most recent report indicates that there were 557 immigration judges working in the first quarter of 2026. Since the closing months of the Biden administration, it has hired a mere 25 immigration judges, suggesting that the agency is unlikely to bring on board enough new immigration judges to replace those who left voluntarily or were fired. The immigration court system has also lost hundreds of staff who support its judges. Like the immigration courts, the number of appellate decision makers at the BIA has also dropped substantially. Last April, the Justice Department cut the number of permanent BIA members from 28 to 15. Asylum saves lives, but the immigration judges and BIA members who decide asylum claims don’t have the resources they need to dig deep into the facts to distinguish strong cases from weak cases. Fewer staff facing growing caseloads under pressure to follow shifting policy directives is a recipe for short-changing the care that complicated legal determinations require. The court’s decision in Urias-Orellana doesn’t alter the work that immigration judges and BIA members do. But by instructing federal judges to defer to them, it does give their decisions greater weight, leaving questions of life and death in the hands of overburdened, understaffed agency employees. The post Supreme Court asylum decision burdens already overworked DOJ appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

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